Supercomputing Alive and Well with Nvidia Titan Black

With all the hype surrounding mobile computing and power efficiency, it’s easy for pc gamers to worry about the future of their monster rigs. NVIDIA, however, decided to remind us that supercomputing is far from over by announcing the successor to the GTX Titan, the GTX Titan Black. While the Titan Black looks to redefine high end, does this GPU change the landscape of the video card market?

When NVIDIA released the 780 Ti, the original Titan had trouble keeping up in gaming performance, albeit it was still the king of compute cards. What the Titan Black does is allow the compute-at-home market to have both high end computing, as well as top of the line gaming. This card fully utilizes the GK110 implementation, giving gamers performance on par with the 780ti, while still having top compute performance. The 6GB of GDDR5 memory runs at a full 7GHz data rate just like the 780 TI and the core and boost clocks are slightly elevated as well, giving what should be somewhere around a 13.8% to 19.9% increase in compute performance.

But, is the Titan Black as impressive as it sounds? Ultimately, it seems that NVIDIA is just giving a valid reason for customers to spend almost a thousand bucks again on a GPU, without feeling like they had to make any sacrifices. This is because the Titan Black improves on the performance of the 780 Ti and original Titan, the architecture here is nothing revolutionary, and quite honestly, is hardly even evolutionary. This definitely isn’t the new Maxwell architecture that should begin making its way into the 800 series of cards. Also, this doesn’t change the current landscape for AMD at all, seeing as their highest end GPU is priced well below the Titan Black and the Bitcoin Miners are still eating up the R9s.

Ultimately, the best news here is that supercomputing is still alive and well. What the Titan Black shows us is that mobile computing still can’t fill the supercomputing niche and for those of us who like powerful gaming rigs, they should be around for a long time to come. Overall, this is still an impressive release from NVIDIA, but as always, the best is yet to come! The Titan Black released on February 18th and the suggested retail is $999, although availability could be limited.